Saturday, January 1, 2011

We're All Jews (Except The Israelis)

While the Israeli government off in Jerusalem is studying in chambers, they say, my marital status, let us, dear readers who have stayed with me through mystical geometry and planetary orbits, call a time out, and let the armies facing each other be fixed in place and we examine the truth and falsity of things.

I keep promising to write nothing more about Jews, but they keep returning to the story. Even here, I make reference to the Bhagavad Gita, and I have to point out that as Koestler tells us in The Thirteenth Tribe the European Jews are descendents of the Kazars, and so come from the same general part of the world the sacred book came from.

And that brings me to the point I wanted to make about the Jews. What defines them is the deal they made individually with God, and also and equally important their unbroken many thousand year history as a people, a people who kept alive the spiritual undertaking to individually keep their word with God.

When you listen to God there are no separate things in your mind. It is the nature of the experience. Therefore, obviously, there are no different races of people listening to God. There can be no races when we talk about God. The Jewish people as a group function as a collective memory. That is a spiritual undertaking, with no connection to bodies. But as we saw when we looked into Kepler's spritual astronomy, an unbroken, filled space of mystical practice is necessary to hold onto the knowledge that we have found. It is not enough to know the rules, we have to keep ourselves in condition to act on them. The same is true of our deal with God, why we must continually be reminded of it. And there we have the significance of the Jewish people as a teaching model: a deal with god and unbroken practice trying to keep it.

It is on this basis that the Jews make a claim to return to the land of Israel. It is a literary claim only, the right to continue a story, but there could be no better kind of claim. As long as it is a good story, a significant story. And what could be more significant than a model of the right way to live?

While the Israeli Agency in Jeruselum is examining my marital status to decide whether I meet the moral requirements they have set to enter Israel, this week their former President was convicted by their courts of raping two women. Define the Jewish people by race, and you can not be Jewish. The majority of Jews may have no family roots in the Middle East, and racists don't see God.